The Lost Amazon: The Pioneering Expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes

By Wade Davis

Explore the uncharted Amazon with acclaimed botanist and pioneering Amazonian explorer, Richard Evans Schultes, guided by an intimate narrative that supplements his photography of indigenous tribes, hallucinogenic plants, stunning vistas, and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earth Aware Editions
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887620152

Book preview

Cover: The Lost Amazon, by Wade Davis

A Rare Photographic Journey Through an Uncharted Land

The Lost Amazon

The Pioneering Expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes

Second Edition

Wade Davis

Foreword by Andrew Weil, M.D.

Afterword by Chris Murray

The Lost Amazon, by Wade Davis, Earth Aware Editions

As a plant explorer, Schultes possessed what scientists call the taxonomic eye, an inherent capacity to detect variation at a glance. When he looked at a forest, his gaze fell reflexively on what was novel or unusual. And since he was so familiar with the flora, he could be confident that if a plant was new to him, it was likely to be new to science. Roupala colombiana was but one of the three hundred or more species discovered by Schultes, many of which he named. He was perhaps drawn to this small tree because he knew that some of its close botanical relatives were believed by Karijona Indians of the upper Río Vaupés to be poisonous. Always on the lookout for biodynamic plants, Schultes never forgot that the difference between a medicine, a poison, and a hallucinogen is merely dosage.

PREFACE

TO THE

SECOND EDITION

BY WADE DAVIS

Fifteen years after his passing at the age of eighty-six on the morning of April 10, 2001, Richard Evans Schultes is justly celebrated as the greatest Amazonian plant explorer of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned seven decades and led to the publication of 10 books and 496 scientific papers, he traveled to the most remote reaches of an unknown continent and made some 30,000 collections, altogether more than 250,000 botanical specimens, which he distributed as gifts to herbaria throughout the world. He described the medicinal use of more than 2,000 plants previously unknown to science. Some 120 species bear his name, including a plant for treating ulcers and another for curing conjunctivitis. A cockroach is named for Schultes. So is a mountain and 2.2 million acres of protected rain forest. Long before it became politically accepted, he spoke out on behalf of the rights of Indian people to use their medicines in sacred context, to live freely on their lands, to pursue their religious beliefs, and to seek their own paths into the future. Before most people knew the meaning of the term rain forest, or, in the case of many North Americans, even the location of the Amazon, Schultes warned that the region was imperiled—and worse, that the Indian peoples and their transcendent knowledge were disappearing even faster than the plants and the forests they understood so well.

In December 1983, then Colombian President Belisario Betancur awarded Schultes the Cruz de Boyacá, Colombia’s highest civilian award. The citation praised Schultes for his contribution to a revitalization of research in the natural sciences in the country. It described him as a scholar whose knowledge and viiigoodwill have always been at the service of the spirit of science in this period of the crudest materialism. Men like [Schultes] have exalted the humble products of the human mind and of God’s handiwork. [He has] magnified the value of mankind. Schultes deeply appreciated this gesture and felt exceedingly honored as a foreign scientist to have been singled out by Colombia for such recognition.

But an even greater prize, if you will, came to him in an indirect manner during the subsequent administration of Virgilio Barco Vargas. For it was President Barco, acting on the advice of his Head of Indigenous Affairs, anthropologist Martin von Hildebrand, who, over the course of four years, handed legal title to more than 246,000 square kilometers of rain forest, an area nearly twice the size of England, back to the rightful owners, the indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon. These rights, encoded in the 1991 Constitution, acknowledged the contributions of indigenous peoples to the national patrimony and freed the peoples of the rain forest to pursue their own way forward in all matters of health, education, and ceremonial life. Nothing like it had ever been proposed, let alone implemented, by a nation state. Colombia, to her immense credit, set a precedent for the entire world with these enlightened and progressive policies. Already they have resulted in a revitalization and rebirth of cultures that would have both astonished and delighted Schultes.

The Barasana and Makuna are not peoples frozen in time. Change, after all, is the one constant in culture. But honored by the state and empowered by national laws that acknowledge ownership of their ancestral lands, they are at last free to choose the components of their own lives. In walking in the paths of their forefathers, they lay rightful claim to what they have always been: the true stewards of the rain forest. That a nation state, in this instance Colombia, would encourage such a process represents a reorientation of priorities that is both historic in its significance and profoundly hopeful in its promise. Richard Evans Schultes may not have understood all of the complexities of Barasana and Makuna mythology and cosmology. He was, after all, but a solitary student of plants. Nevertheless, at a time when these indigenous peoples were imperiled, their children at risk, and their shamans under siege, he was one of the very few who stood up in their defense and heralded both their knowledge and wisdom. He was a spark of light in a very dark time, and the cultural rebirth and resurgence celebrated today by Colombians and all good people of the world owes much to his legacy, which will never be forgotten.

PREFACE

BY WADE DAVIS

Plant explorer, scientist, lover of all things Indian and Amazonian, Richard Evans Schultes never presented himself as a photographer. Still, he was quietly proud of his pictures, as he called them. The walls of his fourth-floor aerie at Harvard’s Botanical Museum displayed many of his favorites: Yukuna wrestlers from the Miritiparaná, the rock silhouette of the spirit from the chasm of Jirijirimo, Makuna youths peering into the abyss of the cataracts of Yayacopi. Each photograph was framed in wood, carefully labeled, and hung in a manner that served only to enhance the timeless quality of the image. Like the man himself, the photographs appeared as if created in another century, another world.

Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was a photograph of something beautiful. An interesting photograph depicted something of note. He was not one to dwell in nuance or metaphor, and to have had his photographs formally critiqued from an artistic perspective would have amused him no end. But he was, without doubt, an accomplished and inspired photographer. Technically adept at using xhis medium-format camera, he approached photography with the same meticulous attention to detail that characterized his work with plants.

All of his photographs were taken with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, which used compact roll film with 2.25-inch-square negatives. Introduced in 1927, when Schultes was twelve, these cameras had liberated popular photography by leading both professionals and amateurs away from the cumbersome large-format plate cameras that had dominated the field. The twin-lens Rolleiflex was one of the first truly portable cameras, rugged but light, relatively simple to use, and quiet, if not silent, in operation. The Zeiss lens was superb, the optics as finely attuned as those of virtually any camera on the market today.

The design and technical features of the Rolleiflex played an important role in the development of Schultes’s style and skill as a photographer. The camera was equipped with a non-interchangeable eighty-millimeter, 2.8 lens. This wide-aperture setting was ideal for the low light conditions of the forest. The limited focal length—effectively, you could not focus the lens within four feet of the subject—implied that all portraits placed the person within his or her environment. One sees the effect created by this imposed distance in many of Schultes’s images: the two Makuna boys, for example, lying together in a hammock, and the Kamsá youth in Sibundoy holding in his hand the flower from the jaguar’s intoxicant. The photographer is present but not intrusive. Robert Capa famously said that if you do not like your photographs, get closer. With the Rolleiflex, you can’t, even if you want to. The camera demands discretion.

The Rolleiflex also had a timer, a ten-second delay, that would have allowed Schultes, with a tripod, to compose an image and then place himself in the shot. A Rolleiflex is not overly complex, but it takes some practice even to align an exposure correctly in the viewfinder. It would not have been possible simply to hand the camera to an Indian companion to take a snapshot. The very best photographs of Schultes—at Yayacopi with the Makuna lads, crossing the forest stream with the botanical specimens in hand, peering like a raptor from the summit of Cerro de la Campana—are almost certainly self-portraits.

Significantly, a person using a Rolleiflex composes the shot by looking into the camera from above. The subject of the photograph appears on a flat ground-glass surface. Thus a three-dimensional scene is viewed by the photographer as a xitwo-dimensional picture, an image that can be carefully studied and composed before the shutter is released. This was ideal for Schultes’s situation. He had a limited supply of film, and it would sometimes be months before it could be developed. The Rolleiflex by its very nature encouraged parsimony, even as it obliged the photographer to be attentive and deliberate in the framing of each image. Schultes learned to be a photographer in the field, and his skill improved over time. The Rolleiflex, in a sense, was his teacher.

The design of the camera also determined how a picture had to be taken. This proved to be of vital significance both artistically and in terms of how the Indians responded to the photographic moment. The Rolleiflex’s point of view is not at eye level, as in the case of modern single-lens reflex cameras, but rather at waist height. Schultes stood well over six feet tall. The Amazonian Indians are generally of short stature. Rather than towering over his subjects, he tended to photograph from below, a perspective that enhanced the dramatic presence of the individuals. This aesthetic quality is particularly evident, for example, in his portraits of the Cofán shaman and the stunning image of the Barasana youth at the rock of Nyi.

In a more symbolic sense, the Rolleiflex by definition demanded that the photographer, in composing and exposing an image, literally bow to the subject of the photograph, a gesture that in the setting of the Amazon, with its history of Indians being violated and abused, transformed the photographic act from one of aggression to one of engagement and humility.

Photography, of course, is not about equipment. The word photography is derived from Greek, meaning to write with light. But the Rolleiflex was an instrument so finely tuned that in the proper hands it became a partner in the creation of art. Schultes understood the fundamentals of the craft. He watched for the soft light of dusk in the Amazon, the twilight moments so fleeting in the tropics. He had an innate eye for composition and, needless to say, fascinating subject material.

The Indians he came to know so well had for the most part had never seen a camera and never been the object of a photographer’s zeal. There is an innocence in each of these visual exchanges that tells much about the level of trust Schultes established through his character and work. He was, if nothing else, a good man, honest and true. Having slipped away from the confines of his own world, he experienced through multiple xiilenses—his eyes, the delicately honed glass of his camera, the visionary realm of the magic plants—an exotic land on the cusp of change. He was the right person in the right place at the right time to accomplish greatness and leave in his wake a remarkable photographic legacy.

An envelope from Schultes’s well-organized